University of Tampere
Institute for Advanced Social Research (IASR) in cooperation with the New Social Research Programme (NSR)

Speakers Series 2017-2018, Spring

Professor David Chandler, University of WestminsterResilience and the New Governmentalities of the Anthropocene: Mapping, Sensing and Hacking

In this presentation I explore three ways of rethinking governance in the Anthropocene. The first is autopoietic and recursive; here, the use of ubiquitous data is seen to enable new methods of mapping/tracing relations in time and space. In this paradigm, problems are seen more clearly through an ontology of depth, ‘drilling down’ to context where processes/path dependencies come to light which can be intervened in. The second is responsive, the paradigm of sensing and datafication: seeing relations in real-time, to enable increasingly automated processes of governing emergence. Here, the Internet of Things and cyborg more-than-human assemblages are imagined to govern with rather than over or against potential problems or threats of climate change, disease or socio-economic crises. The goal is that of resilience: the maintenance of the status-quo or homeostatic governance. The third form of adaptation is sympoietic, less goal-directed and therefore more future-orientated, for example, hacking as a project of exploration of the possibilities of relations and processes, detaching and repurposing assemblages creating new possibilities.

In all three, the ‘what-is-ness’ of the world is given its due; there are no assumptions of linear, abstract or universal frames of knowledge or governmental capacity. They could also be seen as stages through which understandings of the human relation to the world is transformed, enabling adaptive possibilities and facilitating the building of a home in the post human age of the Anthropocene.